Fasten your seat belts and adjust your tray tables; this SF tale offers an exciting ride.
A scientist’s daughter quietly refines quantum human teleportation and teams up with a venture capitalist, but their plan hits deadly turbulence when the predatory CEO of an airline corporation tries to violently hijack the technology.
Heaton’s first installment of The Race Is On techno-thriller series is set in 2002-03, a pivotal time for the protagonists—and the airline industry, a key villain. A slump in air transport following the terrorist atrocities of 9/11 means America’s once-mighty Reynolds Air faces financial ruin. CEO Samuel Reynolds III sees an opportunity to revitalize the ailing company (and save his own reputation). It seems that in Iceland, Uma Jacobsdottir, a pretty, green-minded activist and daughter of a great quantum physicist, has secretly perfected teleportation—the near-instantaneous breakdown and reassembly of atomic matter (including humans) at “LEAP” portals, even at vast distances. The technology has astounding and disturbing applications and implications, but Uma wants to restrict it to long-range transport, eliminating fossil fuels and carbon emissions. She enlists Ethan Rae, a shadowy but ethical venture capitalist from England, to take the discovery public (“Your approach to business benefits everyone, especially the less well-off”). But ruthless Reynolds wants to monopolize LEAP for pure profit, sending hit men and hackers on the attack. Ethan hastily teleports during the crisis, experiencing side effects somewhat familiar to readers of the classic SF short story “The Fly” and viewers of the film adaptations. But here, the result is a strategic advantage, not a monster mutation. The international novel is a page-turner with bigger-than-life heroes and villains, rousing action, aerospace history, a built-in Icelandic travelogue, captivating SF concepts, and joyous storytelling (though important bits of backstory remain conspicuously scattered in the author’s 2022 prequel novella, MAD). Despite the airline business tycoons’ being portrayed as scoundrels, this volume is ideal in-flight diversion fare, worthy of those concourse gift-shop spinner racks full of novels by Alistair MacLean, Michael Crichton, and Clive Cussler. Heaton fact-checks his science and settings in an afterword and invites readers to support him if they want to see the saga continue. It’s likely that most will.
Fasten your seat belts and adjust your tray tables; this SF tale offers an exciting ride. (science fiction)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9780956172020
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Rookwood Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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